Obviously, former President George W. Bush. Despite how much he has
been vilified in the years since his departure from office, the Congress
and the President yesterday decided to ratify almost all of his tax
policy agenda. As Joe Wiesenthal of Business Insidernoted,
"The difference between the Obama Tax Cuts and the Bush Tax Cuts?
Obama's are permanent*." Joe also pointed out, quite astutely,
that even if top marginal tax rates are not lower than in the
Clinton years, taxpayers with the highest incomes are still paying lower
taxes because all the tax rates below the top are lower. Who's
laughing now?

Not me. In over eight years of blogging, you won't find a single word
of praise for the Bush-Obama tax cuts. As a matter of revenue, we now
permanently have a tax system that will not raise enough revenue to
cover our expenditures. As a matter of policy, we continued to
constrain our choices based on whether some portion of legislation that
wasn't popular enough to pass initially without explicit sunsets should
be continued or not. The proper course of action
for President Obama was to allow all the sunsets to occur and then to
force the Republicans to propose legislation to achieve their political
objectives. Instead, he surrendered his political advantages and handed
it to them without a fight. What an abject failure of leadership. I am
reminded this year, as I was last,
of a statement by Paul Tsongas in his Call to Economic Arms, "It takes
toughness to lead a people toward their preservation no matter how
disquieting the journey may be."

Maybe the next step is as Brad DeLong suggests
-- they are now Obama's tax cuts, so he has to find a way to fund them.
A large carbon tax to recover much of the revenue would complete the
"Green Tax Swap" that I have long wanted to see. An economist can hope, can't he?"